INTERNATIONAL BLOODY MURDER

Information technology is the very symbol of twenty first century civilization. It is also the technology which, more than any other, symbolises what Martin Heidegger called the ‘enframing’ of human beings: their reduction to statistical units in vast labor and marketing processes; to the status of “utter availability and sheer manipulability”5 IBM under Thomas Watson embodied and enacted the massive use of information for social manipulation and control. It was, as Edwin Black remarks, “gripped by a special, amoral corporate mantra: if it can be done, it should be done.” The direct consequence was Hitler’s automated genocide and the blitz in his krieg.